The Railroad Problem Part 15

A certain big railroader out in the Middle West has very determined opinions in regard to the possibility of the pa.s.senger end of the railroad receipts being increased. Like many of the big operating men he affects a small regard for the pa.s.senger service. And this despite the fact that if you touch the average railroader, big or little, upon his tenderest spot, his pride in his property, he will talk to you in glowing terms of the "Limited," the road's biggest and fastest show train--showy from the barber shop and the bath in her buffet car, to the big bra.s.s-railed observation platform at the rear. He will not talk to you at length of his freight trains, but he will prate unceasingly of Nineteen's "record"--how she ran ninety-eight per cent on time last month, a good showing for a train scheduled to make her thousand miles or so well inside of twenty-four hours.

This big railroader of the Middle West does not, however, take your time in mere boasting of his operating record. He comes to cases, and comes quickly--to the question of increased pa.s.senger rates when our present flood tide of traffic has descended to the normal.

"See here," he tells you when you are seated in his big, comfortable office, "here are the figures. They speak for themselves. Take New York, for instance. There were 120,750 commuters entering and leaving that big town each business day last year. With an average ride of fourteen miles for each commuter, we have a total pa.s.senger mileage of 1,014,300,000 miles in that metropolitan district. The pa.s.senger traffic from New York westward to Chicago and beyond in the same time was 234,482 pa.s.sengers.

Multiply these by the average rail distance between the two cities, 960 miles, and you have another 225,083,520 pa.s.senger-miles. Now to this add 163,620 commercial travelers, each riding an estimated average of fifty miles a day--2,454,300,000 miles for these--and you have a total of 3,693,683,520 miles--or approximately ten and a half per cent of the pa.s.senger miles on our steam railroads last year. This ten and a half per cent of the pa.s.senger travel was partic.i.p.ated in by 518,832 persons--a little bit more than one-half of one per cent of the total population of the country. If this rule holds good it follows that five and three-tenths per cent of the population of the United States, or 5,194,000, received in an average year all the benefits of the pa.s.senger-carrying establishment of the railroads.

"The average journey upon our railroads last year was thirty-four miles; therefore, a round trip between New York and Chicago represented twenty-eight average trips; a round trip between New York and San Francisco ninety-two average trips. We can agree that the bulk of the pa.s.senger travel consists of commuters, commercial travelers, men on business trips, and persons traveling for pleasure; in proportion about in the order I have given them. If these figures show anything, they show that the great bulk of our pa.s.senger mileage is used by a cla.s.s which we may call constant travelers. I believe that it is a reasonably safe a.s.sumption that at least four-fifths of the 35,000,000,000 pa.s.senger-miles made last year were used by this cla.s.s of travel, probably representing less than 10,000,000 of the population of the country. This same 35,000,000,000 of pa.s.senger-miles distributed equally among our entire population produces 357 pa.s.senger-miles per individual.

"It is a simple matter for the artisan, the farmer, or the man in the street, without _Wanderl.u.s.t_ in his blood, to figure out for himself that if he and each member of his family do not travel their 357 miles in a single year then he is helping to pay for the pa.s.senger service of the railroads in the form of increased freight charges.

"I myself have always maintained that the pa.s.senger revenues of our railroads do not render their proportion of the cost of operation. The Interstate Commerce Commission has upheld the same contention, as anyone can see by its recent decision granting increases in pa.s.senger rates proportionately much higher than the increases in freight rates. These figures of mine show how a privileged cla.s.s, representing ten per cent, or, at the widest calculation, not more than twenty per cent of the population, have been receiving transportation at far less than the actual cost; while the remaining ninety per cent of the citizens of the United States have paid the freight--literally."

The railroader's figures are interesting--to say the least. And we must a.s.sume that he has not forgotten the fact that there is one great economic difference between the freight and the pa.s.senger traffic. The one must move, and, save in the few cases where waterborne traffic competes, move by rail; a large part of the other is shy and must be induced. If this were not true the big railroads would be advertising for freight business as steadily and as strongly as they advertise for pa.s.sengers. Of course a large proportion of folk travel because necessity so compels, yet there is a goodly proportion, a proportion to be translated into many thousands of dollars, who travel upon the railroad because the price is low enough to appeal to their bargain-sense. In this great cla.s.s must always be included the excursionists of every cla.s.s. These folk must be lured by attractive rates. And as a cla.s.s they are particularly susceptible just now to the charms of the railroad's great new compet.i.tor--the automobile.

It was only two or three years ago that the round-trip ticket at considerably less than the cost of two single-trip tickets and the twenty-dollar mileage book, ent.i.tling the bearer to 1,000 miles of transportation, prevailed in the eastern and more closely populated portion of the United States. The price of the mileage book was raised to $22.50. Within a short time it is likely to go to $25. And there are shrewd traffic men among the railroad executives of the country who today say that within twenty years it will cost five cents a mile to ride upon the railroad--as against an average fare of two and a half cents today.

And I do not think that, in view of the advances in cost--as well as that great necessity in making good that loss in both physical and human equipment, to which I have already referred--the public will make any large protest. The average man does not wish to ride upon a railroad that is neglecting either its property or its employees. He is willing to pay a larger price for his transportation if only he is a.s.sured that this larger price is going to make his travel more safe and more comfortable in every way.

Therefore I do not think that it is going to be very hard for the railroads to gain necessary advances in fares--particularly if they will not forget one big thing. The success of the Twentieth Century Limited and the other trains of its cla.s.s ought not to be lost upon the railroader.

With service he can trade for increased rates. There are many large opportunities for the railroad along these lines, in both freight and pa.s.senger service. A progressive desire to enter into these opportunities will probably bring the railroad many of the advances that it so sorely needs. And I am not sure but that such a spirit would also do much toward securing for it the very necessary unification of regulation--not alone of its income but also of its outgo--that it so earnestly seeks at the present time.

CHAPTER XIII

REGULATION

At the time that these lines are being written the railroads of the United States are entering a veritable no man's land. The ponderous Newlands committee of Congress has begun its hearing and accomplished little; so little that it has asked and received an extension of time of nearly eleven months in which to go into the entire question more thoroughly. We all hope it does. The Adamson bill, establishing the so-called eight-hour day for certain favored cla.s.ses of railroad employees, is statute, but its const.i.tutionality is yet to be established. And the railroads are preparing to fight it, in its present form, and to the bitter end. General sympathy seems to be with them; it is quite probable that even the four brotherhoods that fought for the measure--unlike the Pears Soap boy--are not quite happy now that they have received it.

In the midst of all this confusion President Wilson, a.s.sured of a second term of office and so of a reasonable opportunity to try to put a concrete plan into effect, has emerged with his definite program, not radically different from that which he evolved last August at the time of the biggest of all crises between the railroads and their labor, but which was warped and disfigured until its own father might not know it. His plan, as now is generally known, provides not alone for the eight-hour day for all cla.s.ses of railroad employees, but includes the most important feature of compulsory arbitration referred to in an earlier chapter.[17]

It now looks as if the United States was upon the threshold of the eight-hour day--in many, many forms of its industrial life. I believe that, in his heart, the average railroader--executive or employee--favors it, fairly and honestly and efficiently applied. It has been charged as the first large step forward toward the government operation of our railroads, yet I cannot see it as nearly as large a step as the extension of the maximum weight of packages entrusted to the parcel post, a system which if further extended--and apparently both legally and logically extended--might enable a man to go up to Scranton and place enough postage stamps upon the sides of a carload of coal to send it to his factory siding at tidewater. Compared with this the eight-hour day is as nothing as a step toward government operation or ownership. A genuine eight-hour day is, of course, a long step toward the nationalization of our railroads--quite a different matter, if you please.

President Wilson's entire plan, as it has already been briefly outlined, forms a very definite step toward such nationalization. It at once supersedes the indefinite quality of the Newlands committee hearings--no more indefinite at that than the average hearing of a legislative committee. When the Wilson plan has been adopted, fully and squarely and honestly, either by this Congress or by the next, it will then be the order of the day to take up some of the next steps, not so much, perhaps, toward the nationalization of our railroads as toward the further bettering of their efficiency and their broadening to take advantage of some of their great latent opportunities as carriers of men and of goods.

The men who control our railroads today look forward to such a definite program with hope, but not without some misgivings. For, after all, we are by no means nationally efficient, and there seems to be a wide gulf between the making of our economic plans and their execution. No wonder, then, that the railroads are dubious. They are uncertain. They have been advised and threatened and legislated and regulated until they are in a sea of confusion, with apparently no port ahead. The extent of the confusion is indicated not alone by their failure to handle the traffic that has come pouring in upon them in the last days of the most active industrial period that America ever has known, but by the failure of their securities to appeal to the average investor--a statement which is easily corroborated by a study of recent Wall Street reports. And what would be a bad enough situation at the best has been, of course, vastly complicated by the labor situation.

We already have reviewed some of the salient features of that situation; we have seen, of organized labor, the engineer and the conductor at work; and of unorganized labor, the section-boss and the station agent. We have seen the equality of their work and the inequality of their wage. It is futile now to attempt to discuss what might have happened if the pay envelopes of all these four typical cla.s.ses of railroad employees had been kept nearer parity. As a matter of fact the disagreeable and threatening situation between the railroads and the employees of their four brotherhoods is largely of their own making. If, in the past, the railroads had done either one of two things there probably would be no strike threats today, no Adamson legislation, no president of the United States placed even temporarily in an embarra.s.sing and somewhat humiliating position. The railroads, in the succession of "crises," as we have already studied them, must have foreseen the inevitable coming of the present situation. They could have fought a strike--and perhaps won it--at any time better in the past than at the present. The brotherhoods have gained strength and the efficiency of unison more rapidly than the railroads. And even if the railroads at some time in the past had fought the issue and lost it, they at least would have had the satisfaction of having fought a good fight and an honest one. Inst.i.tutions are builded quite as frequently on defeats as upon successes.

Or the railroads might have sedulously recognized the nonunion worker in their ranks and by a careful devotion to his position and his pay envelope kept his progress equal to that of his unionized brother. True, that would have cost more in the first place, but it now looks as if the railroad would have to pay the amount in the last place--and the accrued interest is going to be sizable.

It is not yet too late to do this last thing; it is a principle for which the railroaders should fight, into the last ditch. The greatest of the many fundamental weaknesses of the Adamson bill is the bland way in which it ignores this principle--the way in which, as we already have seen, it singles out the four great brotherhoods for the generous protection of the so-called "eight-hour day," and leaves all the other railroad workers out in the cold. Or is it a method of proselyting by which the four brotherhoods hope to force the other branches of railroad workers into organization?

It is not too late for the men who control our railroads to offset such brutal forms of proselyting by raising the status of their unorganized labor--voluntarily and in advance of possible legislation, if you please; with a generosity of heart that cannot fail to make a warm appeal to public sentiment. It is not too late for our railroads, on their own part, to consider labor from as scientific and as modern a viewpoint as they do their physical and financial problems. It is not too late for them to raise up high executives who shall make labor, its emoluments and its privileges, its possibilities of evolution their whole study. In an earlier chapter of this book we discussed this matter in detail; called attention to the lack of new blood of the right sort coming to the ranks of the railroad, to the opportunity of fixing wages upon a purely scientific as well as a cost-of-living basis; suggested even the broad possibilities of the bonus system as well as the abandonment of the complicated double basis of payment to trainmen which has crept into effect.

Upon these foundations the pay envelopes of the railroad worker in the future must be figured. If the railroads themselves are incapable of so establishing it--and in full fairness to them it must be stated that the time may have pa.s.sed when they were capable of accomplishing this, unaided at least--then the national government must step in and do it. The Interstate Commerce Commission may be asked to establish, with compulsory arbitration, not only a minimum but a maximum rate which the railroad may pay its various cla.s.ses of employees--and so still another great step will be taken in the nationalization of our system of transportation. Call it socialism, if you like; I do not, but I do feel that it is another large step toward nationalization.

Moreover, the very consideration of the topic brings us at once to the greatest immediate necessity of the railroad--unified regulation.

Unified regulation is the crux of the railroad situation today, from the railroad executive's, the investor's, and the patron's point of view. Your wiser executive is holding the question of increased rates in abeyance for the moment. He is devoting his best thought and his best energy toward simplifying and bettering railroad control. He has a frank, honest motive in so doing. Not only will he build toward permanence of the great national inst.i.tution with which he is connected but he will begin also to induce Capital--the wherewithal with which to build up properties and pay-rolls and possibilities--to come once again toward the bedside of the sick man.

Capital is a sensitive creature. Conservative is far too mild a word to apply to it. Capital takes few chances. And the steady and continued talk of the plight of the railroad has driven Capital away from the bedside of the sick man. Yet Capital, if unwilling to take chances, rarely overlooks Opportunity. And if Capital be convinced that Opportunity is really beckoning to the Railroad, that fair treatment is to be accorded to the patient at last, he will return there himself and place his golden purse in the sick man's hand. Only the wary Capital will demand a.s.surances--he will demand that the Railroad's two nurses, Labor and Regulation, be asked to mend their manners and that that fine old physician, Public Sentiment, be called to the bedside.

Let us cease speaking in parables, and come to the point:

Railroad regulation today is, of course, an established factor in the economic existence of this nation. Already it is all but fundamental. It came as a necessity at the end of the constructive and destructive period of American railroading. I connote these two adjectives advisedly, for while the railroad in a physically constructive sense was being built it also was doing its very best to destroy its compet.i.tors. It had hardly attained to any considerable size before the natural processes of economic evolution began to a.s.sert themselves. Certain roads, stronger than others, still stronger grew. And as they stronger grew, the sense of power, the economic value of power, came home the more clearly to them. To gain power meant, first of all, the crushing of their opponents, if not by one means then by another.

This is not the time or place to discuss the great evils that arose from the unbridled savagery of cut-throat compet.i.tion in the seventies, the eighties, and the early nineties. The whole rotten record of rebates, of sinister political advantages gained through bribery of one form or another, has long since been bared. The illegitimate use of the railroad pa.s.s in itself makes a very picturesque chapter of this record.

Such a condition of affairs could not go forward indefinitely. In this day and age it is a wonder that it existed as long as it did exist. Out of this turmoil and seething chaos was born Railroad Regulation. She was a timid creature at first, gradually feeling her increasing strength, however, and not hesitating to use it. For a long time she had a dangerous enemy, a fellow who up to that time had allied himself almost invariably with railroads and railroaders--the practical politician. Eventually this fellow took upon himself the role of best friend to Railroad Regulation.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ROYAL GORGE, GRAND CANYON OF THE ARKANSAS, COLORADO

The most remarkable chasm in the world traversed by a railroad.]

The effect of the railroad pa.s.s upon the dishonest newspapers was only a little less potent than upon the dishonest politician. Put in its kindliest light it was a softening influence in the editorial sanctum.

When it was gone a sterner spirit began to a.s.sert itself in a large portion of the press. The railroad was being called to account for its sins more sharply than ever before. And a smarting politician who went before a legislature with some measure striking hard at a railroad could be reasonably a.s.sured of a large measure of support from the Fourth Estate.

In the golden age of journalism both editors and reporters spent their vacations in delightful, but distant, points. It was a pretty poor sort of journalist who paid his fare when he wished to ride upon the cars.

Generally his own office took care of his rather extensive and extravagant demands for travel. If, however, he happened to be employed upon one of the few honest newspapers who had conscientious scruples about accepting free transportation, either wholesale or retail, from the railroads, he generally had recourse to the local politicians. There were aldermen in New York, in Philadelphia, and in Chicago, undoubtedly politicians in numerous other cities, who carried whole pads of blank railroad pa.s.ses in their pockets. It was only necessary for them to fill these out to have them good for immediate transportation. The effect of this transportation upon the political welfare of the railroads in city halls, in courthouses, in state capitols, even in the national capitol itself--can well be imagined.

There was another evidence of this golden stream of free transportation.

It was having a notable effect upon the pa.s.senger revenues of the railroads, particularly in the relation of these revenues to the cost of operating the trains. It was no unusual thing for a popular evening train from some state metropolis up to its capital, to be chiefly filled with deadheads. The railroads grew alarmed at the situation. It was beginning to overwhelm them. They looked for someone to help them out of it. They found that someone in Railroad Regulation--that spiritual young creature who had been brought into the world and clothed with honesty and idealism.

Railroad Regulation came to their aid. Railroad Regulation abolished the pa.s.s--the illegitimate use of the pa.s.s, at any rate. Long before this time she had made rebating and bribery cardinal and unforgivable sins.

The effect upon the dishonest politician as well as the dishonest newspaper was p.r.o.nounced. The reaction was instant. If this new creature, Railroad Regulation, possessed so vast a strength, the roads should be taught to feel it. They would be shown exactly where they stood. And so it was that viciousness, revenge, and a crafty knowledge of the inborn dislike of the average human mind to the overwhelming and widespread corporation seized upon Railroad Regulation.

Now the railroads were indeed to be regulated. The spiritual creature was given not one iron hand but eventually forty-six. In addition to the Interstate Commerce Commission down at Washington, each of forty-five separate states gradually created for themselves local railroad-regulating commissions. The efficiency of these boards was a variable quality--to say the least. But if each of them had been gifted with the wisdom of Solomon as well as with the honesty of Moses, the plan would not have worked, except to the great detriment of the welfare of the railroads. No railroader today will deny that it has worked in just such detrimental fashion. He will tell you of instance after instance of the conflicts of authority between the various regulatory boards of the various states through which his property operates; of the still further instances where these conflict with the rulings and orders of the Federal board at Washington.

Railroaders have large faith in the Interstate Commerce Commission. They believe that is both fair and able, a great deal more able than most of the state regulatory boards. Yet even if all the state boards were as efficient as those of Ma.s.sachusetts or Wisconsin--to make two shining examples--the system still would be a bad one. Today these state boards, in many cases under the influence, the guiding power, or the orders of erratic state legislatures, are imposing strange restrictions upon the railroads under their control. In sixteen states there are laws regulating the type of caboose a freight train must haul. Linen covers are required for head rests in the coaches in one commonwealth; in another they are forbidden as unsanitary. Oklahoma and Arkansas are neighbors, but their regulations in regard to the use of screens in the day coaches of their railroads are not at all neighborly. In one of them screens are required; in the other, absolutely forbidden. It, therefore, is hard work to get a train over the imaginary line which separates Arkansas and Oklahoma without fracturing the law. According to a man who has made a careful study of the entire subject, thirty-seven states have diverse laws regulating locomotive bells, thirty-five have laws about whistles and thirty-two have headlight laws. The bells required range from twenty to thirty-five pounds and one state absolutely insists upon an automatic bell-ringing device. The five-hundred candle-power headlights that are good enough for Virginia may be used across the border in Kentucky, but not in North Carolina, which will not permit lights under fifteen-hundred candle-power. And South Carolina insists that the headlight shall be ten-thousand candle-power or a searchlight strong enough to discern a man at eight hundred feet. Nevada goes still further and says that the light must show objects at a distance of a thousand feet.

Even the lowly caboose, the "hack" of the freight-trainmen, has not escaped the attention of state legislators. While many states are quite content with the standard eighteen-foot caboose mounted on a single four-wheel truck, thirteen of them demand a minimum length of twenty-four feet--Missouri twenty-eight and Maine twenty-nine--while fifteen insist that there must be two of the four-wheel trucks. The legislators at eight commonwealths have solemnly decreed that caboose platforms be fixed at twenty-four inches in width, Illinois and Missouri require thirty inches, while Iowa and Nebraska are content with eighteen and with twenty inches respectively. A legislator's lot cannot be an entirely happy one when it comes to determining these details of railroad equipment. But then compare his lot with that of the man who must operate the railroad--who finds that one state compels the continuous ringing of the locomotive bell while a train is pa.s.sing through one of its towns; despite the fact that an adjoining state makes such an act a criminal offense. The life of a man who must operate a railroad over some seven or eight of these states is certainly cast upon no bed of roses.[18]

Yet these are but the smaller troubles which await him. Take the question of the so-called "full-crew" law: Beginning only a very few years ago a wave of legislation swept over the country, compelling the railroads to increase the number of brakemen that they carried upon each of their trains. The carriers protested bitterly against the measure. They said that it was arbitrary, expensive, illogical, unnecessary. But it was indorsed by the labor organizations, and the politicians fell in line.

Twenty-two states pa.s.sed the law. Governors Foss of Ma.s.sachusetts, Cruce of Oklahoma, and Harmon of Ohio vetoed it. So did Governor Hughes of New York. Later Governor Sulzer of New York signed it. It also became operative in Ohio. The people of Missouri, speaking through their referendum, threw it out. But in twenty states it became and remains statute--a greatly increased operating charge against the railroads which operate through them. The "full-crew" law in Pennsylvania, in New York, and in New Jersey costs the Pennsylvania Railroad an extra $850,000 a year--five per cent, if you please, on $17,000,000 worth of capital.

The "full-crew" legislation has been followed more recently by an attempt at legislation regulating the length of trains--freight trains in particular. Some of the men who engineered the first crusade have been responsible for the second. They have volunteered the suggestion that the railroads have sought to offset the effects of the "extra crew" by lengthening the trains. And they have countered by proposing statutes suggesting that all freight trains be limited to fifty cars, about half of the present maximum.

To the average man this will seem as logical as if the state were to step in and tell him how long he must take to reach his office in the morning or how long he must wear a single pair of shoes. To the railroader the injustice of the thing comes home even more sharply. For these ten years or more he has been working to increase the efficiency of his plant. He has believed that one of the straightest paths to this end has been in increasing the capacity of his trains--just as the carrying capacity of merchant ships has steadily been increased. He has made this possible by enlarging his locomotives and his cars, by laying heavier rails, by rebuilding his bridges and by ironing out the curves and reducing the grades in his tracks, by multiplying the capacity of his yards and terminals--all at great cost. These things have made the 100-car, 5,000-ton capacity freight train not merely a possibility, but to his mind an economic necessity as well. And this despite the interesting opinion of Mr. Harrington Emerson which I have given in an earlier chapter.